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Mrs. Dalloway
Author: Jack Kroll
Date: Mar. 2, 1998
From: Newsweek(Vol. 131, Issue 9)
Publisher: Newsweek LLC
Document Type: Movie review
Length: 404 words

Full Text:
In a movie universe clanking with special effects, Mrs. Dalloway dares to luxuriate in art's greatest special effect: language, it's
something of a miracle to succeed in adapting Virginia Woolf s landmark (and eternally popular) 1925 novel, written almost entirely in
its characters' stream of consciousness. But it's been pulled off by a gifted and gutsy team headed by a noted writer-actor, Eileen
Atkins; a supersensitive director, the Dutch-born Marleen Gorris (whose "Antonia's Line" won the 1995 Oscar for best foreign-
language film), and a supreme actress, Vanessa Redgrave. They have made a million-faceted gem, flashing forth the world inside
Clarissa Dalloway's head, and outside, with the sights and sounds of a teeming London on a fine June day in 1923.

Mrs. Dalloway's interior monologue, spoken on the soundtrack by Redgrave in her crushed-velvet voice, veers like a verbal dance
between present and past. The Clarissa of 30 years before rejects the feverish idealism of one suitor, Peter Walsh, for the unexciting
security of another, Richard Dalloway. Her best friend, Sally Seton, is a bohemian beauty who talks of "changing the world" and
scoots naked through the halls of Clarissa's proper family house. Now, five years after the Great War, Mrs. Dalloway is a chiffoned
pillar of society, her husband a minor M.P., her life measured out by her fashionable parties. Her odyssey through the great city is
intercut with a more painful one by a shellsbocked veteran, Septimus Smith. Mrs. Dalloway's day is climaxed by her party, Smith's by
his suicide. But these contrasting events are two parts of a symbolic whole, Virginia Woolf herself. Mrs. Dalloway is a Woolf without
the genius, while Smith's fate prefigures the troubled Woolf's own suicide in 1941. In her notebook Woolf wrote, "Mrs. D seeing the
truth. SS seeing the insane truth."

This truth is that of spiritual death. At her party, attended by the decaying lions and lionesses of the English ruling class, Mrs.
Dalloway ponders her loss of "the thing that matters" to a life of "corruption, lies and chatter." Her one moment of incandescent
feeling occurred long ago when Sally kissed her, bringing a smile of ecstatic wonderment to her face. Natascha McElhone as the
young Clarissa is part of a superb ensemble that seems to create a cityful of characters. Redgrave's haunting performance is a
double incarnation. She is Mrs. Dalloway and she is Woolf, a gallant icon of a gracefully collapsing world.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1998 All rights reserved. Any reuse, distribution or alteration without express written permission of the
publisher is prohibited. For permission: www.newsweek.com
http://www.newsweek.com/
Source Citation (MLA 9th Edition)
Kroll, Jack. "Mrs. Dalloway." Newsweek, vol. 131, no. 9, 2 Mar. 1998, p. 80. Gale Academic OneFile,
link.gale.com/apps/doc/A20324647/AONE?u=unilanc&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid=9a828dc2. Accessed 16 Jan. 2023.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A20324647